I’ll be closing up shop here for the short term as the new fall semester’s about to start, and my time becomes lees my own again.It’s been a good run, and minus a few days, I did a rather good job of keeping myself to the goal.
But! Keep watching this space… it is far from abandoned!
Title: Tank Girl
Director: Rachel Talalay
Year of Release: 1995
Major or Recognizable Actors: Lori Petty, Naomi Watts, Ice-T, Malcolm McDowell, Iggy Pop
Anyone else involved of note? Based on the comic book by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett (with liberal quotations of art by Hewlett and Philip Bond); Music by Graeme Revell, with a soundtrack featuring Devo, Björk, Hole, The Magnificent Bastards, Bush, face to face, Ice-T, Iggy Pop, Joan Jett and Portishead; Production design by Catherine Hardwicke; SFX makeup by Stan Winston, Vocal effects by Frank Welker
Availability: DVD, VHS
Brief (spoiler-free) summary: In a post-apocalyptic desert future, a sassy rebel against the all-power corporation that controls the water supply takes her revenge against their injustices by force.
Have I seen this before? No
Thoughts: This was alright enough, but not everything I’d hoped for. A little too calculated, all the best jokes were taken verbatim from the comic book — that is, were the actual comic panels onscreen. Cute, but not what I’d hoped for. That said, Naomi Watts is several times more beautiful as a bespectacled brunette.
Was it worth my time? Mostly
Would I recommend this to others? No
Title: Phantom Town
Director: Jeff Burr
Year of Release: 1999
Major or Recognizable Actors: No
Anyone else involved of note? No
Availability: VHS (DVD?)
Brief (spoiler-free) summary: After the mysterious disappearance of their parents, a group of precocious children venture out into the desert in search of a town that doesn’t seem to exist on any maps…
Have I seen this before? No
Thoughts: Something like Invaders from Mars or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but with a Western/Lovecraftian twist. Sounds like fun, yeah? That fun gets mitigated by the poor acting of the child leads, the inconsistant characterizations (even from line to line!) in the script, and the general miasma of a Full Moon production. There’s plenty to be charmed by here, and there are indeed some rather startling moments, considering the genre (“family horror”), but I went in with my expectations perhaps set a bit too high. If I was a good deal younger, I think that this would have made my day.
Was it worth my time? Mostly
Would I recommend this to others? With Qualifications; I think I would have gotten much more behind this when I was 8 or so
So, for a period of just over two weeks, I haven’t done much to maintain this blog. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been watching… but it has meant I’ve been travelling and entertaining. Here’s what I watched in the intervening time (which you’ll notice doesn’t come close to a movie a day):
Title: Magic of the Universe (Monster of the Universe)
Director: Tata Esteban
Year of Release: 1987
Major or Recognizable Actors: No
Anyone else involved of note? No
Availability: DVD, VHS
Brief (spoiler-free) summary: After his wife and daughter are kidnapped by an evil sorceress, a magician and his young assistant must free them before her evil revenge plot can be fulfilled.
Have I seen this before? No
Thoughts: Despite some interesting special effects, this movie was largely a waste of time. This is particularly disappointing since the advertising for the movie (and the catalog copy that initially attracted me) strongly suggested that this was a Masters of the Universe cash-in. Sadly, none of the Conan-in-the-future vibe of the cartoon or subsequent Cannon film are to be found here. Some setpieces are rather striking (the robot/skeletal birds that flank the sorceress’s throne), and there’s a Boxer’s Omen-esque feel to the horror that comes either because of or in spite of cheap special effects, but they seem to be used in the service of very little of merit.
Was it worth my time? No
Would I recommend this to others? No
Title: The American Astronaut
Director: Cory McAbee
Year of Release: 2001
Major or Recognizable Actors: Cory McAbee, Rocco Sisto, Tom Aldredge, Bill Buell
Anyone else involved of note? Written and produced by Cory McAbee, Music by The Billy Nayer Show
Availability: DVD
Brief (spoiler-free) summary: In a future where cowboy-esque spacemen run the fringes of the solar system, space pilot Samuel Curtis becomes embroiled in a complicated, planet-hopping get-rich-quick scheme, all the while being pursued by the psychopathic Professor Hess.
Have I seen this before? Yes
Thoughts: For quite a long time I confused the unassuming title of this picture with that of The Astronaut Farmer, a movie I have no interest at all in seeing. consequently, it very nearly passed me by. But, since seeing it for the first time, I’ve become a convert to the cause, and maintain this to be one of the most scrappy, funny movies I’ve seen in recent memory, and a rare exception to the old saw that low budget filmmaking produces shoddy, over-reaching results. The acting is great, the songs are great, the grittyness of the production design masterfully disguises (or accents) the use of commonplace objects in unexpected circumstances… what more could one hope for? Certainly, at times the humore verges on the homophobic (or so it seems about half the time I’m watching) and an early gag seems to veer toward the scatological, but these are small concerns in the face of the larger accomplishments of the movie itself.
Was it worth my time? Yes
Would I recommend this to others? Yes
Title: Eating Raoul
Director: Paul Bartel
Year of Release: 1982
Major or Recognizable Actors: Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, Robert Beltran, Buck Henry, Ed Begley Jr., Richard Blackburn, The Real Don Steele, Edie McClurg
Anyone else involved of note? Written by Bartel and Blackburn, Produced by Blackburn, Soundtrack includes a memorable cover of “Devil With a Blue Dress On” by Los Lobos
Availability: DVD, VHS
Brief (spoiler-free) summary: A quirky couple, tired of life in the city and the vulgar habits of those around them, want to retire to the country and open up a fine-dining restaurant. Strapped for cash, they realize that killing swingers and stealing the money will both get them to their financial goal and perform a valuable public service…
Have I seen this before? Yes
Thoughts: This may well be Paul Bartel’s best movie. By turns innocent, deviant, kitschy and careful, Bartel and Blackburn (who wrote, directed and stars in Lemora, another favorite) do amazing things here. I can’t recommend this enough.
Was it worth my time? Yes
Would I recommend this to others? Yes
Title: Don’t Look Now
Director: Nicolas Roeg
Year of Release: 1973
Major or Recognizable Actors: Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie
Anyone else involved of note? Based on the story by Daphne Du Maurier
Availability: DVD, VHS
Brief (spoiler-free) summary: A couple in Venice, trying to reconnect after the accidental death of their young daughter, meet up with a pair of old women who bring them portents of doom. Have they become embroiled in a sinister conspiracy?
Have I seen this before? Yes
Thoughts: While I enjoyed this just as much this time as I have before, my fellow viewers at the Simms Film Institute weren’t so impressed. They either didn’t feel like they “got it” or else felt that the film was either too much or not enough “horror.” I guess I can see it from such a perspective abstractly, but I find that my feelings tread much more the party line of critics like Ebert — the atmospheric “sense of place”, the visual repetition of menacing shapes, the genuine terror of that penultimate scene… this one always sticks with me.
Was it worth my time? Yes
Would I recommend this to others? Yes
Title: The Naked City
Director: Jules Dassin
Year of Release: 1948
Major or Recognizable Actors: Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart, Kathleen Freeman (The Penguin from The Blues Brothers)
Anyone else involved of Note? Music by Miklós Rózsa and Frank Skinner; Produced and Narrated by Mark Hellinger
Availability: DVD, VHS
Brief (spoiler-free) summary:
Have I seen this before? No
Thoughts:
Was it worth my time? Yes
Would I recommend this to others? Yes
Title: Harold and Maude
Director: Hal Ashby
Year of Release: 1971
Major or Recognizable Actors: Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon, Cyril Cusack, Vivian Pickles, G. Wood, Eric Christmas, Tom Skerritt (billed as M. Borman)
Anyone else involved of note? Music by Cat Stevens; Screenplay by Colin Higgins; Produced by Higgins
Availability: DVD, VHS
Brief (spoiler-free) summary:
Have I seen this before? Yes
Thoughts:
Was it worth my time? Yes
Would I recommend this to others? Yes
Title: Faust: Love of the Damned
Director: Brian Yuzna
Year of Release: 2001
Major or Recognizable Actors: Mark Frost, Jeffrey Combs
Anyone else involved of note? Screenplay by David Quinn, based on the comic book by Quinn and Tim Vigil; SFX by Screaming Mad George; soundtrack includes songs by Fear Factory and Coal Chamber
Availability: DVD
Brief (spoiler-free) summary: A psychiatrist and a rogue cop both become embroiled in an occult conspiracy after the arrest of a man who claims to have sold his soul in exchange for a pair of mystic blades and an inhuman bloodlust…
Have I seen this before? No
Thoughts: This was almost worthwhile, but went wrong somewhere along the way. My difficulty is pinpointing precisely where it went afoul. The plot was a reasonable enough amalgam of typical satanic conspiracy fare, a superhero revenge plot and (of course) Marlowe/Goethe’s Faust, but its lack of originality wasn’t itself a liability — quite the contrary. Likewise, the seeming lack of motivation for the protagonist can be chalked up to some ambiguity as to how much time has passed between the murder of his wife and his capture at the embassy — is it days, months or years? M, the villain of the piece, is not powerful enough to be as menacing as he wants to be, and yet too powerful too often to be as weak as he is much of the time. I would have liked to have seen this role played by Julian Sands or Malcolm McDowell rather than Andrew Divoff, who can’t ever seem to quite be able to pull off menacing and sinister. Likewise, I wouldn’t have minded if Mark Frost was allowed to either be British or work more on his American accent — as it was, his occasional lapses were somewhat distracting. I didn’t like how casually the movie played off the trauma of rape, nor how trivialized and even eroticized that rape is by the movie’s conclusion. I was never sure how complicit Jade was in her role in the film’s climax, and that seems like a rather important element. By the end, the movie felt to me as though I’d seen it several times before, which is the real shame. At its start, this seemed as though it might actually have been an interestingly dark take on “adult”/occult superheroics in a post Spawn or Ghost Rider context — that is, done well. Instead, it seemed awfully juvenile, and far too interested in tits and gore to really sort out the implications of the story it was trying to tell.
Was it worth my time? Mostly
Would I recommend this to others? No
Title: The Flash
Director: Robert Iscove
Year of Release: 1990 (CBS)
Major or Recognizable Actors: John Wesley Shipp, Amanda Pays, Paula Marshall, M. Emmet Walsh, Richard Belzer
Anyone else involved of note? Music by Danny Elfman and Shirley Walker; Written and produced by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo
Availability: VHS (standalone), DVD (with the rest of the series)
Brief (spoiler-free) summary: After a chemical accident, police scientist Barry Allen gains super-speed powers, and uses them to fight a vicious gang terrorizing Central City.
Have I seen this before? Yes
Thoughts: Though I suppose technically a serial television episode rather than a movie proper, The Flash was released on its own as a TV movie. It’s self-contained and at a feature-length hour and a half or so, who’s counting otherwise? I loved this movie as a kid, and watched the copy I had taped off television to death. I didn’t have the opportunity to see much of the subsequent show (Cub Scouts met the same night) but it occupied an important part of my Batman-driven interest in DC Comics circa eight or nine years old. With some hindsight, there are elements at play here that simply don’t work: The Flash as Spider-man-esque angst-driven “blood red demon” seems misguided and over the top, and there are wholesale elements (the first minute or so of the show; the molded muscle suit; the “you made me” confrontation climax) that feel obligatorily grabbed whole-cloth from the success of the earlier film. But, there’s lots here that I’d argue is done better than Batman: the story feels complete, the lighting and set dressing are compelling, and simultaneously dark and colorful (lots of neon highlights to dark, wet settings), and the designs of Central City are nicely split between almost exclusively Deco exteriors and contemporary cars and mobile and touch-tone phones. This is an above-average superhero romp, and I find that I still dig it quite a lot.
Was it worth my time? Yes
Would I recommend this to others? Yes
Title: In the Loop
Director: Armando Iannucci
Year of Release: 2009
Major or Recognizable Actors: James Gandolfini, Gina McKee, Anna Chlumsky, Mimi Kennedy, David Rasche, Steve Coogan
Anyone else involved of note? No
Availability: In [some] theaters (as of this writing)
Brief (spoiler-free) summary: A somewhat incompetent, low-level British minister and his staff become embroiled in the debate as to whether America will go to war in the Middle East.
Have I seen this before? No
Thoughts: This was even more funny than I’d hoped. As a political satire, the foreign policy train-wreck was funny in the hand-biting way. As a British comedy of a post-Office/Fawlty Towers stripe (the movie is a spin-off of Iannucci’s British show The Thick of It, which features the Malcolm character in this film), it was filled with moments of delightful awkwardness. And finally, the wonderfully scripted banter kept me howling. I can’t recommend this enough.
Was it worth my time? Yes
Would I recommend this to others? Yes
I was being social and cleaning the house for having friends in town. So it goes, I guess?
Title: Mortuary Academy
Director: Michael Schroeder
Year of Release: 1988
Major or Recognizable Actors: Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, Tracey Walter (Bob, the Joker’s Goon), Wolfman Jack, Cesar Romero
Anyone else involved of note? Screenplay by Paul Bartel (at least according to IMDB, if not the credits themselves)
Availability: DVD, VHS
Brief (spoiler-free) summary: Two entitled teen brothers inherit their late uncle’s lucrative mortuary, under the condition that they also graduate from the mortician’s school that the uncle also founded. The headmaster of the
Have I seen this before? No
Thoughts: Aside from Lust in the Dust, which I’ve been keeping back for just such a moment, I’ve seen all of Paul Bartel’s features. This begins to lead into somewhat suspect territory. Mortuary Academy, from the man who was Bartel’s assistant director for Lust and the mediocre Longshot, the producer of One Dark Night and director in his own right of Cyborg 2 and 3, seemed a strong second-best option, as it’s (ostensibly) written by and stars Bartel. It was alright, but ultimately not great. If he had been behind the camera, this film would be at least as good as some of the “hack work” Bartel-directed pictures of the mid-80s, but nowhere near how good he is at his best. His performance is enjoyable, though, and he is both properly officious and extraordinarily off-putting in his one-sided, awkward “seduction” sequences. I laughed.
Was it worth my time? Yes
Would I recommend this to others? With Qualifications; Everything else I’ve seen of Bartel’s (except maybe Not for Publication and Longshot) has been better.
Title: Carver’s Gate
Director: Sheldon Inkol
Year of Release: 1995 (Sci-Fi Channel)
Major or Recognizable Actors: Michael Paré
Anyone else involved of note? No
Availability: DVD
Brief (spoiler-free) summary: In a future where the virtual-reality game Afterlife consumes the time and energy of what’s left of humanity, the discovery of the Transcender, a device that will allow humans to physically live inside the game, leads to the violent death of the game’s creator, and a race by various powerful factions to gain the device’s possession. Caught in the middle is Carver, a “Dream-cop” who deals in Afterlife crime, and the ex-boyfriend of the deceased…
Have I seen this before? No
Thoughts: What if eXistenZ was a made-for Sci-Fi movie, with all the requisite budgetary shortcuts, genre conventions and action sequences that the former movie lacks? You’d have something rather close to Carver’s Gate… except the latter movie isn’t an eXistenZ cash-in, it precedes the former movie by a good few years. That’s part of what makes Carver’s Gate so enjoyable: it’s breaking some new ground, but feels like it isn’t. There’s some amateurish acting, and at times the budget feels lower than a given episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. BUT, there’s a whole lot of charm to keep the affair afloat. The designs for the monsters that populate Afterlife are clever and well-executed (some look absolutely great), and despite some Logan’s Run echoes, the costumes that the “Dream-cops” wear manage to look rather good as well. It’s not a masterpiece, but this one seems like it would succesfully entertain the committed viewer looking for a good ’90s period piece. It certainly worked for me,
Was it worth my time? Yes
Would I recommend this to others? Yes
